Unlike some of the wildly imaginative Shakespearean visions displayed
at Washington's Folger Theatrefor example, a Measure for Measure
that incorporated puppetry and a Macbeth with illusions designed by
the magician Tellerthe company's current production of
Hamlet boasts just one unique feature, but it's a good one.
Francesca Talenti has converted the play-within-a-play into a video
presentation, which spills across James Kronzer's pristine white set and
keeps the onstage audience at the center of the action.

Aside from that bravura moment, the play as presented in modern dress
by director Joseph Haj is fairly straightforward, using a cast of 12. The
familiar soliloquies are there, while discreet cuts to the script keep the
run time to less than three hours.

Graham Michael Hamilton gives Hamlet the necessary melancholy of a
grieving young man, along with an existential sense of aimlessness
suggested by Kronzer's forbidding, featureless image of the castle at
Elsinore. Jan Chambers' costume design echoes the overall grimness with
its focus on black, white and shades of gray; aside from the casually
dressed hipsters Rosencrantz (Billy Finn) and Guildenstern (Dan Crane), no
one wears colors until the second act.

Haj has found clever, sometimes amusing modern counterparts to William
Shakespeare's characters. Claudius (David Whalen), Hamlet's uncle who has
usurped both the throne and the late king's wife, is a confident figure in
a military uniform, attended by the sycophantic aide Osric (Jonathan Lee
Taylor); Gertrude (Deborah Hazlett) is every inch the circumspect
political wife in her sleek white suit. On the other hand, Polonius
(Stephen Patrick Martin) is not the boring old man he can be; he's sleek
and comfortable with court intrigue, although at a disadvantage when faced
with Hamlet's withering cynicism. Justin Adams is an impassioned Laertes,
and Lindsey Wochley a heartrending Ophelia.

The small cast allows for some felicitous doubling: Scofield, who plays
the sorrowful Ghost and the bombastic Player King, and Martin return as
the drily witty gravediggers.